Delight Customers with Web Self-Service in the Cloud

According to Forrester, 72% of customers prefer using a company's website to answer their questions. However, only 52.4% find the information they need online.  Customers want to solve their issues quickly and easily on the web. When they can, they will buy more from you, with 88% saying they will increase their purchases. 

Companies want to empower consumers to serve themselves online because it not only increases customer loyalty, but it also reduces support costs—by more than 50x since the average support call costs $5.50 versus $.10 for a web interaction.

However, most companies aren’t doing enough to guide customers to the answers they need online. That’s a costly mistake because 89% of customers will stop doing business with you after one bad experience. The organizations that are investing in web-self service are doing much better, achieving customer self-service success rates of 65.6%, which translate into an average $22 million saved on unnecessary channel escalations. 

You can achieve similar results by investing in three web self-service areas:

1. Understand your customer’s needs to personally guide the online experience

Invest in master data management to develop a 360-degree view of your customer. With this unified profile, you can deliver personalized, relevant content on your site to guide customers to the best, fastest resolution based on their needs and value.

Big Fish Games, for example, uses its 360-degree customer view to personalize online service based on information from the customer’s profile and web session. Using this approach, Big Fish Games has achieved a web self-service rate of 96.4% and savings of $870,000 from call and email deflection.

2. Empower your customer with online self-service tools

Empower your customer with self-service tools for quickly and easily resolving issues. Knowledge tools facilitate the customer’s journey with natural language and federated search to find the best answer across multiple sources. Social collaboration tools enrich the customer’s experience by enabling information sharing on Facebook support sites or peer-to-peer communities. Chat, cobrowse, and click-to-call reassure customers that help is just a click away.

Drugstore.com offers customer support on Facebook, and monitors and responds to customer social media interactions just like any other support request. With this strategy, drugstore.com has decreased email volume by 30% and saved over $350,000 per year on call deflection.

3. Adapt support processes to meet your customer’s rising expectations

Use analytics, outbound communications and customer feedback to deliver personalized web self-service that meet your customer's rising expectations.

• Analytics and social monitoring help you identify and address knowledge gaps and support issues
• Outbound communications anticipate customer needs by notifying them of relevant events—service alerts, knowledge updates, product offers—in their channel of choice.
• Customer feedback builds consumer input into your business processes so you can continually improve your customer service and products.

Also, visit Oracle Service's website to learn three key tips for transforming web self-service.